Rate this book

The Last Summer (2012)

by Judith Kinghorn(Favorite Author)

3.85 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0451416635 (ISBN13: 9780451416636)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

NAL/Penguin USA

review 1: I am kind of a history buff, so I like reading historical fiction. This story was very engaging- I was so engrossed in Clarissa and Tom's love affair that I never wanted to put the book down. The detail of the home and grounds of the estate was incredible; I was really able to picture myself roaming around and getting lost there on a summer day. There was a nice balance between love, war, passion, and tragedy. Kinghorn did a great job keeping my interested in this novel.
review 2: This is a disappointing book. I am convinced the author wrote it to milk the Downton Abbey craze. For example, it's an upstairs-downstairs romance where the privileged Clarissa GRANville (GRANtham) of the Deyning estate (Downton) falls in love with a servant's son named TOM. WWI ar... morerives and turns their world upside down, but Downton Abbey's treatment if the war looks profound compared to this book. The author seems to only have a smattering of knowledge about the war and did a minimal amount of research. In the acknowledgement a at the end of the book, she does not list any book or library she used for research. But then again, this book is not about the war, but the melodramatic heroine who just goes through life pining after Tom-- whom she seems to love because he is handsome, enigmatic, and calls her "beautiful, desirable, and unattainable". After they are separated, he goes to America and returns as a Gatsby-figure-- no one is quite sure how he earned his money, and the story continues on for another two hundred pages and transforms itself into An Affair to a Remember. To use a British term, this is pure treacle. less

Download links for: The Last Summer

Advertising